“To be honest, no. These voices will probably stay.” Frederik tapped the optician’s ear with the nasal speculum. “Where are they supposed to go? They don’t have anyone besides you. And they never learned how to do anything other than harangue you.”

The head mirror slipped over Frederik’s eyes. He pushed it to the back of his head. “And stop reading to them. No postcards and no Buddhism. They’re so old, they know it all already.”

He put the speculum on the kitchen table and looked at the optician. The optician picked up the speculum and examined it for a long time.

“Amazing what you can do with modern technology,” he said, smiling.

The optician drove home. There, he dropped facedown on his bed, the bed that was just the right size for one person, feeling at least as heavy as the heart of a blue whale, as heavy as something that seems anatomically impossible. I’ve got to tell Selma that it’s possible to be that solid and that heavy, he thought before falling asleep, in case she doesn’t know.

Naturally the optician’s inner voices were not going to leave him in peace just because someone claimed to have seen them. It wasn’t that easy, but it did gradually become less difficult.

The optician stopped reading to the voices. He stopped pretending he was a river or the sky, which had never been hard to disprove in any case. He no longer professed anything. He never said anything to them at all anymore. In time the voices’ hiss softened to a lisp, their wails turned to whines. The optician didn’t lose the voices, but over time the voices lost the optician. When they said something, which they continued to do often, they spoke more and more into the void, as if to a broken answering machine.

BIOLUMINESCENCE

I haven’t talked this much for a very long time,” Frederik said. We sat on the windowsill, looking at my sofa and my bed, where Frederik and I were separately not sleeping. Between us was a bowl of peanuts that Frederik had already emptied and filled again.

“I’d really like to stay longer, but I have to go back tomorrow,” Frederik said.

I looked at him, and he could probably see clearly that I thought this was terrible.

“Is that bad?” he asked.

I thought of the authenticity valued in Buddhism and how I had forbidden it to everyone. It had still found its way, and it hadn’t been so bad. Authenticity, I thought, come on, Luisa, one, two, three.

“No,” I said. Dammit, I thought. “No, it’s not bad.”

A book that had been stuck at an angle on top of the others on the bookshelf fell to the floor. An Outline of Psychoanalysis. My father had given it to me.

“Around you, things are often falling,” Frederik remarked.